Wilson is driving. He’s got a new truck with leather seats. He doesn’t have a car phone, even though he sells them. He’s read that they cause brain cancer, and so instead all he has is a digital pager, which records the number of messages coming into his answering machine back in Houston. Wilson bought a computer program that pointed out to him that, based on last year’s data, each incoming phone call brings him—on the average—another $152.18 of business.
The pager is hooked to the sun visor of his truck, and each time it goes off—a rapid series of beeps and clicks—all three men whoop and tally the total: Dave counting with true gusto, elated for his little brother, and Artie sick with green envy but happy at the thought that at least somebody, somewhere, is getting gouged.
It’s a lot of work for Wilson to go out and answer each of those calls—to drive out and fix whatever’s wrong with the system or to install a new one—but he does it. He has no employees. He’s a one-man show. He won’t even be twenty-nine for another ten months. It makes him seem richer than he already is, though in his mind, it’s a little bit like he’s drowning, or gasping for air—like he can’t quite get enough air—and he doesn’t like that feeling, and he’s trying not to worry about the business so much.
Fishing trips, such as this one, with his brother, help.
…
Even though it is still an hour before daylight, the pager’s going off about every ten minutes. If the pager gets too full—it will hold only a certain number of messages, depending on their length—Wilson can stop and get out and make a few calls from a pay phone, but he hopes that doesn’t happen today.
As they drive, all Artie talks about—sitting in the back seat and watching the digital glow of the pager, waiting for its red light to blink in the dark, waiting for the beeping to go off again—is his and Dave’s work. Even though they saw each other on Friday, they go over it again, shooting the shit about each employee in the office—talking about their work in the familiar but also exploratory manner of raccoons crouched by the side of a creek, fishing for mussels in the night: turning them over with their paws, feeling every ridge, every bump. There is the one who is getting fired, and the one who does not get her reports in on time. There is the good-looking one and the plain one. There is the asshole and the brown-noser, and they laugh and talk about the brown-noser for a while.
Then they talk about the handsome one, whom they dislike intensely because he is arrogant, and finally, after several miles, they settle on the scapegoat, the gullible one, Clifford.
They savage Clifford; it is as if he is meat and they are eating him. It is as if they are cutting him up and swallowing him. Every week there is something new that Clifford’s done, or which they’ve done to Clifford, some small thing to share and to revel over. This morning Artie is telling Dave about how he bad-mouthed Clifford’s new truck, a Chevy, as not being nearly as strong as Artie’s old truck, a Dodge.
“Oh, he was hot!” Artie hoots. “He started stuttering and saying that all his friends who had horses and who trailered them out to the country each weekend used Chevys, and I interrupted him and said, ‘Well, yeah, they’re okay trucks for little weekend pullers.’” Artie imitates the brush-away hand-waving motion he’d given Clifford—and Dave laughs, too.
“Weekend pullers,” Dave says. “That’s a good one. Him and those damn horses.”
Clifford, who is slightly ahead of them in hierarchy, though not a real boss, has been going out to the new racetrack by the airport and has been buying the bargain horses, the ones that are not quite fast enough.
“It’s like a compulsion,” Artie says. “He’s bought about fifty of them so far, and he doesn’t show any fucking sign of stopping.”
“I could kill him,” Dave says, from out of the blue.
Wilson looks at his brother in surprise. Artie laughs a mean laugh.
“I had to go over to his house for a barbecue once, while you were out of town,” Dave tells Artie. “Some bullshit office party. He had just been out to the racetrack that day and had brought home two more horses. He had them in his back yard and was feeding them apples and hay and making everyone touch them,” Dave says. “He kept making everyone pat their flanks, their rumps. ‘Feel that,’ he’d say, ‘Feel how hard that is.’ I’d never seen such sad pieces of shit in all my life. He says he’s going to sell them as polo ponies. He thinks that because they almost ran races, they’re some kind of super-horses, and always will be. He thinks almost is real close, instead of real far.
“When he comes in my office to ask me something,” Dave goes on, “the first thing I ask him, right away, before he can say anything, is ‘How long are you going to be in here?’”
“You tell him that?” Artie says.
“Hell yes,” says Dave. “He doesn’t like it, but there’s nothing he can do. Just because he’s above me doesn’t mean he can fire me. Besides, he doesn’t know shit. He’s always asking people to help him fill out his reports. He’ll ask the same question five days in a row.”
“He does that, doesn’t he?” Artie says. “Asks the same question twice.” Artie’s speaking slowly now, and where before he had a kind of cocksure glittering anger in his dark eyes, doubt is now starting to seep in, and it comes into his voice, too, a change that is so noticeable that Wilson, driving, looks in the rearview mirror to see what’s going on.
“Hey,
